Recognizing and understanding the needs of our customers

Responding to the needs of patients

At Sumitomo Dainippon Pharma, the safety of the patients who use our products is our top priority. To ensure safety, we incorporate the dosage forms and indications that best meet patients' needs from the initial planning stages of development. In addition, we have adopted a special printing method that prints the name and dosage over each dose on the PTP sheet to make our products more distinguishable and prevent errors when individual doses are separated from the sheet.

In safety and every other area important to patients, we will continue to make the most of our global business platform to broadly meet diverse patient needs. To achieve this, we are working constantly to enhance our expertise and raise the reliability of our data.

Supporting informed consent

Informed consent is defined as “the voluntarily given agreement (consent) on the part of the patient who will be participating based on a proper understanding of and agreement with a complete explanation from a physician or other medical professional of the patient's illness and the treatment strategy” when a patient is to participate in clinical trials or receive medical care.

Since clinical trials are conducted during the intermediate stages of confirming the efficacy and safety of drug candidate substances, it is particularly important that the informed consent of a patient is based on sufficient data and a careful explanation of all that is involved. In order to help patients decide whether or not to participate, we compile a wide range of data that covers the state of clinical trials in Japan and overseas, as well as the possible outcomes indicated by clinical findings, so that it can be presented in a manner that is easy for the patient to understand.

Reflecting the needs of our customers in products, information and services

While packaging and labeling designs are subject to many restrictions, displaying certain product information is mandatory, as well. Given these limitations, the design of more than one company's product packaging and labels may happen to look alike, and this confusion has become a contributing factor in pharmaceutical product mix-ups.

At Sumitomo Dainippon Pharma, the packaging and labeling team of the Manufacturing Management Department heads our efforts to respond to the needs of both medical institutions and customers by improving packaging and label designs to prevent medical errors. We focus particularly closely on making sure that our packaging and labels are easily distinguished from other products since serious problems can arise when pharmaceuticals are taken incorrectly. Although we check in advance to ensure that our product names and package designs are not similar to products already on the market, we take immediate action to rectify the situation when our products are mistaken for others despite these efforts. We work with the company marketing the other product to modify product names and designs so that they are easily distinguishable from one another.

In fiscal 2012, we went even further, introducing the industry's first laser printing to our manufacturing line in order to print the product name on the top of the cap of bottles containing our tablets. Since most medical institutions store these bottles in drawers, having the product name printed on the cap, as well as on the bottle, makes the products easier to identify and remove. In the past, we had affixed removable labels to the sides of the bottles, and employees at these medical institutions would then move the labels to the caps themselves. Having the name printed on the cap before the product ships saves medical staff time and trouble.

We have also taken steps to improve our PTP sheets to make them easier for patients to use.